It didn't have space aliens,
karate-kicking mutants or even a pre-sold toy line. But for 15
years, three million children watched Davey and Goliath,
the story of a boy, his dog, and the teachings of the Lord.
Animated by Art Clokey's Premavision studio, and with scripts
provided by the Lutheran Church, the adventures of Davey Hansen
and his talking dog became both a popular children's series and an
indelible piece of baby boomer pop culture.

"I think, of all the things
that I have done in my life, I am most proud of Davey and
Goliath," said Ruth Clokey Goodell, who worked with the
series from the beginning. "We were really doing something to
help the children of our country, and of the world. I really am
proud of that. This show had a message. It wasn't just junk."

The Lutheran Church not only funded
the series, their broadcasting division wrote many of the scripts,
and gave the shows for free to 190 TV stations around the world.
Back in the 1950's, when religious broadcasting usually involved
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and a blackboard, Franklin Clark Fry,
president of the United Lutheran Church in America, set aside $1
million in the church treasury to fund production of future
television programs. For Fry, he saw how a mixture of the medium
and the message might help the Lutheran Church spread the word of
God to new places.

By
the late Sixties, Davey lived in a more culturally diverse
neighborhood. The few faces included, from left to right,
barbershop owner Henry Lee, Jonathon Reed, Davey's new
best friend, and Pops the street vendor who calls his hot
dogs "frankfurts" in front of Goliath.

A few years later, the ULCA noticed
that a small clay green character and his orange horse - Gumby and
Pokey - mesmerized children across America. The Church envisioned
Biblical lessons as told through this "trianimation"
technique. Within days, the ULCA contacted Art Clokey, the creator
of Gumby, and asked if his Premavision Studios could produce a new
children's show, Davey and Goliath, for them.

For Clokey, the Lutherans' offer
was his chance to fulfill a lifelong dream. "I went into
Hartford Seminary in 1947 to become a minister," he said in a
telephone interview. "Now there were Lutherans,
Presbyterians, Greek Orthodox and Episcopalians training to be
ministers in their particular denomination. I went there with the
idea of becoming a minister. But in the middle of the year, I
wanted to make religious films, so I left the seminary in 1948,
and went to Hollywood to make religious films. Cathedral Films was
the first place I went to. They couldn't take me, because I wasn't
a member of the Union. So I went into business for myself, and
made commercials for Coca-Cola and Budweiser. I designed and
produced TV spots for them for about three years, until I got a
chance to make Gumby. It's a wonderful miracle that the Lutheran
Church saw Gumby on WPIX, and I flew out to California to make a
deal to use the Gumby technique to make this religious series. It
was just what I wanted to do."

The first Davey and Goliath
episode, "Lost in A Cave," premiered in 1960. Each
episode was a day in the life of Davey Hansen, his blond-haired
sister Sally, and his talking dog Goliath. Of course, Goliath only
spoke to Davey; to everybody else he just barked and growled. When
he wasn't doing chores, studying at school, or playing with his
friends Jimmy, Nat and Teddy, or hanging out at the "Jickets"
clubhouse, Davey learned how his world was influenced by God and
family.

Each episode was essentially a
parable, explained so children could easily understand religious
and Scripturological concepts. For example, in "The
Runaway," Davey returns home after a quixotic attempt to join
the circus, much like the Prodigal Son returned home. A boy who
wears "The Polka Dot Tie" is ostracized for being
different, in a thinly veiled discussion of tolerance. And in
exploiting an untapped area - children's television - with their
message, the ULCA found that kids learned Bible lessons in the
same way they would learn multiplication tables and conjunction
junctions ten years later.

All the human characters on the
show - Davey, Sally, his parents, his friends and the adults in
the town - were assembled the same way. "They were foam
rubber," said Art Clokey, "they were cast in hydrocal
molds. First we placed ball and socket steel armatures in the
mold, and then cast the foam around it. All but the head. The head
was cast in epoxy. I wish we had done it in clay. We would have
gotten a better feeling. The lips were cut out pieces of
construction paper. And the eyes were like Gumby's eyes - a white
surface, and we'd push the pupil, which would be black or blue,
around on Vaseline. The pupil would be a piece of photographic
paper that had been exposed and was black."

Goliath,
the talking dog, was also foam, except his eyes had the same
plastic ping-pong ball look as did Gumby and Pokey. "Jim
Danforth was the only one who could get Goliath to walk
convincingly," said Spencer Gill, who worked with many of Davey
and Goliath's animators on other projects. "Goliath had
no shoulder joint, just a joint where the leg met the body so the
leg couldn't extend outward as Goliath took a step. To see what
I'm talking about, move your arm without moving the shoulder, and
then do it normally while mimicking the walk of a dog while you
are on all fours. You will immediately see why Goliath walked so
awkwardly."

Whatever the characters lost in
mobility, they made up in durability. According to Art Clokey, the
same figurines could be used over and over again. "They could
last for the whole series, for two or three years, because we
would take them in, put on clean clothes and repair the armatures
if one broke. They weren't replaced the way Gumby was. We'd take a
whole tray of Gumbys and give them to the animator and he would
use up a dozen Gumbys every day."

"The actual storylines were
given to us by the Lutheran Church," recalled Ruth Clokey
Goodell, "and we had to work within that framework, they
supervised all the editing of it and everything. We didn't start
shooting until the script was written and sent to them. Howard
Coleman was the man that we worked with the most."

Once Coleman approved the scripts
and sent them back to Premavision, filming began. Working one
frame at a time, making slight positioning adjustments per each
film exposure, the Premavision animation team could crank out a
minute of usable film per day, one 15-minute episode per month.
And where Gumby's sets and backgrounds were abstract models, clay
sculptures and oversized toys, the sets for Davey and Goliath
were realistically replicated, as a railroad hobbyist might build
a village for his train set. "For 'The Silver Mine,' we built
a miniature mine shaft in the middle of the studio," said
Clokey, "and actually it looked like rock on the sides, but
they were actually painted aluminum foil. For 'A Sudden Storm,' we
had to go outside the studio, there was a big empty lot next door,
and we constructed a huge pond that became the lake set. We used
actual water. It must have been 30 feet long, 20 feet wide. People
ask us how we made such detailed sets - it was simple, we just
didn't use a computer."

"Raymond Peck was our
supervisor," recalled Ruth Clokey Goodell, "It wasn't
thrown together in just a day's time. You would have been amazed
had you ever watched the whole process. It really was detailed. It
kept our staff very busy. They had good training."

Each episode was created on a
shoestring budget. Premavision charged the ULCA $900 per animated
minute, $15,000 per episode. "They got a good bargain for us,
I tell you," said Clokey. "With Gumby today, it's
now $15,000 a minute. We produced Davey and Goliath on a
nonprofit basis. We just made salaries, and no residuals. We were
hoping that they would let us make a Davey doll and a Goliath doll
and maybe a Sally doll as toys, but they wouldn't. I don't blame
them, because they felt it would have commercialized the
series."

In 1962, the ULCA merged with the
larger Lutheran Church in America, and the LCA took over Davey
and Goliath's funding. By now 39 episodes had been produced,
and thanks to the National Council of Churches Broadcasting and
Film Corporation, a major distributor of religious programming,
episodes were airing all over North America. Davey and Goliath
even made inroads into the foreign markets, as the show was
translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Cantonese.

By
1965, the LCA funded a 30-minute holiday special, "Davey and
Goliath: Christmas Lost and Found." In this episode, Davey
decorates his house, trims the tree and even organizes a Christmas
pageant - but doesn't feel Christmasy inside. On the night of the
pageant, he offers his role as one of the Three Kings to another
kid, and then understands that in giving away what he treasured
most - his role in the pageant - Davey realizes why giving is so
important in Christmas.

"Christmas Lost and
Found" was so successful that the LCA funded five more Davey
and Goliath half-hour specials, which stations aired during
the holidays. One of these vignettes, "Happy Easter,"
was a ground breaking episode featuring a subject most childrens'
programs wouldn't dare discuss.

In "Happy Easter,"
Davey's grandmother dies three days before Easter, and Davey is
grief-stricken that he will never see her again. His father, with
help from an Easter pageant passion play, explains the concept of
death, resurrection, heaven and the afterlife. Davey fights back
his tears, knowing that he will see his grandmother again someday
- in heaven. "The Easter special was my favorite
episode," said B. Baker, who watched Davey and Goliath as a
child in Jackson, Mississippi. "The appearance of the sweet,
kind grandmother -- the sort of grandma all of us could use -- her
extremely sudden off-stage death, and Davey's sorrow. Heck, MY
sorrow."

By 1969, the series had become so
successful that the LCA asked Premavision to create another run of
15-minute episodes. While Art was no longer part of the series (he
and Ruth Clokey were divorced in 1966), Ruth continued to
supervise production of the series. "My father was a Lutheran
minister," said Ruth Clokey Goodell, "Father Joseph
Parkander. I had a lot of training in the Lutheran Church. My
whole background was formed by him. It would have been difficult
to continue this series if I hadn't had that kind of
background."

The new series reflected both the
social and multiethnic diversity of the 1960's, and replaced some
episodes like "Ten Little Indians" and "The
Gang," whose questionable stereotypes did not age well.
Davey's friends now included Cisco, a Hispanic boy, and Jonathan,
the first black recurring character on the show. Jonathan's father
owned a pharmacy/soda shoppe, and the kids hung out there. Other
adults in the neighborhood included Mr. Lee, the barber; Pop, the
absentminded hot dog vendor; Miss Lindsey, Davey's new
schoolteacher; and Officer Dan, the new cop on the beat.

Episodes now concentrated on racial
tolerance and integration, charity and community spirit, while
still focusing on the life lessons of God and of the Lutheran
Church. Davey and Jonathan would redeem pop bottles for movie
money, only to discover another boy who hopes to redeem the pop
bottles for breakfast money ("Boy in Trouble"). When
Davey thoughtlessly pours red paint into a well, he discovers that
his "joke" affects the entire ecological community
("The Caretakers"). And stories about polka dot ties
were replaced with stories about the deaf ("Louder,
Please") and race relations ("Blind Man's Bluff").

The final Davey and Goliath
episode, a 30-minute feature called "To the Rescue,"
premiered in 1975. But within a few years of that broadcast, Davey
and Goliath faded from the airwaves. Television stations were no
longer under an FCC mandate to set aside time for religious
programming, and Davey and Goliath was replaced by other
profitable ventures like off-network sitcoms and syndicated
cartoons. In an ironic twist, many of those time slots were also
snapped up by televangelists, who could pay stations to air their
sermons - the same stations who originally aired Davey and
Goliath in those time slots for free.

But the show didn't disappear for
long. Al Eicher, president of one of the first companies to market
motion pictures for home video, purchased the secular marketing
rights for Davey and Goliath from the Lutheran Church in
1986. "I got a call from Chris Lee from the Lutheran Church
in America. Chris had been in touch with me since 1983, asking if
I'd be interested in marketing Davey and Goliath on home
video. I made a deal and bought the rights from the Church. Over
the years, we've moved about a half million units. I was initially
only permitted to market it to the Christian bookstore market and
catalogs (a competing property, Augsburg Press, reserved other
rights). But in the last year, Augsburg got out of the video
business, so the church called me and said 'Al, the market's open
to you.'"

Since 1990, Eicher has released
some of the most popular episodes on videocassette, including such
classics as "Christmas - Who Needs It?" and "Happy
Easter." Eicher even made some feature-length movies, such as
Davey and Goliath: Lost and Found, and Davey and Goliath
on Vacation, by re-editing some of the episodes that had
similar themes.

Davey and Goliath can still
be found on some religious and public broadcasting stations,
including the VISN and Cornerstone networks. Thanks to Al Eicher,
an open-captioned version of Davey and Goliath appears each
week on the Disability Network. Newly-dubbed episodes can now be
seen in Korea, Germany and the former Soviet Union. The series
itself has become a part of pop culture, as references to Davey
and Goliath can be found on shows like The Simpsons, Beavis
and Butthead, Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Mad TV.

Even Art Clokey is amazed by the
sustained popularity of Davey and Goliath. "In the
1980's, my wife Gloria and I went on a tour of colleges and
theaters, giving lectures and showing episodes of Gumby to
students, but at the end, when it was time for questions and
answers, they would always ask about Davey and Goliath. I
was proud that it was so well-received, the spiritual or religious
messages were so well-received by so many. And that we had a hand
in making them, directing them and so on."

It has also inspired Clokey to
create a new religious series, this time starring Gumby. "I
was just thinking of a new type of religious series, this time
using Gumby, where he goes into various situations that bring out
the historical facts about what each religion teaches. The
Muslims, Sufis, the Buddhists, the Hindi, and so on. Christians of
various faiths, various denominations. At the earliest, we may
start production in 1998. But I think it's badly needed, because
there's so many misconceptions about other religions, so to
speak."

Davey and Goliathbrings
moral and faith-based values
to
a new generation of children in lively and engaging ways.